Gallery2:About

From Gallery Codex

Contents

About Gallery 2

Gallery is a web based software product that lets you manage your photos on your own website.

You must have your own website with PHP and database support in order to install and use it.

With Gallery you can easily create and maintain albums of photos via an intuitive interface. Photo management includes automatic thumbnail creation, image resizing, rotation, ordering, captioning, searching and more. Albums and photos can have view, edit, delete and other permissions per individual authenticated user for an additional level of privacy.

It's great for communities - give accounts to your friends and family and let them upload and manage their own photos on your website!

Solutions

Minimalistic - Do you just want to show a simple collection of a few photos on your website without a lot of features and overhead?

Just install the typical Gallery package which just comes with a basic set of features.

I want more! - Do you want a community platform with a lot of features and services?

Install Gallery and select from a large collection of 'modules' the ones that add the features you need.

Chameleon - Do you have a specific look and feel in your mind?

Gallery can look like anything you want it to. You can choose from many existing 'themes'. Want to show more/less photos on each page? Want to change a title or description? You can do those things easily with some clicks. Do you want a completely different look? Change the theme or create your own theme!

Extend! - Can't find a specific feature? You can extend the Gallery framework with your own modules and themes!

Gallery is a special purpose PHP application framework which works with PHP 4.3.0+ and PHP 5.0.4+. The framework is object-oriented, uses the MVC pattern, has versioned APIs, is 100% i18n ready with many active localizations, has a built-in database abstraction layer supporting many different DBMS, is well tested with an ever increasing number of unittests, and much more.

Integration or "What is Gallery not?"

Gallery is a PHP framework specialized for managing photo collections. We believe in creating a best-of-breed product and to seamlessly integrate it with other excellent products.

Gallery is not a blog software. But people found Gallery to be an excellent way to manage the photos that they show in their blog. Take a look at the Gallery / WordPress integration.

Integrate Gallery with your CMS / Portal! Gallery is not a general purpose content management system. Gallery is specialized to manage photos in albums and it's pretty good at managing other media like video and audio files as well. But if you need a system to show news, text documents, calendars and the such, you should look for a CMS.

Integrate Gallery with your forum! Forums are a completely different beast. Most general purpose CMS may have a forum, but forums serve such a special purpose and are so good at it that adding forum-like features to other applications usually never comes close to the user-experience you're used from real forum solutions. You can use ready-made integrations with phpBB, SMF, vBulletin and other forum software.

Integrate Gallery with your group-ware, wiki and other special purpose applications! Developers have been busy and there are many existing integrations. You can also develop your own integration.

Features

Basic Photo Album features:

Easy to create Photo Albums

Easy ways to add Photos, e.g. with Drag and Drop Tools

Photo and Album Administration and Editing

Auto-Generation of Thumbnails and Resized Images

Handles Many Image Formats

Comprehensive Features:

Easy Installation and Upgrades

100% Multi-User Ready

User and Group Management

Themeable - Change the Look and Feel by Switching Themes. Code and Presentation are Separated.

Comprehensive Permission Management (Album and Item Level)

Extensible - Add / remove Features by Installing 'modules' and Change the Look by Switching 'themes'

Over 25 Integrations into CMS, Portal, Forum, Blog Software and other Systems

Internationalized - Over 20 Mostly Complete Translations (and Many More Less Complete Translations)

Community Building Features (User-Albums, Comments, User Self-Registration, ...)

Secure - Gallery has been audited by several core developers and by paid professionals for application security

Portable - Gallery runs on any webserver with PHP 4 or PHP 5 and with a wide variety of database servers

Multimedia Ready - Watch Streaming Videos, Listen to Music, ...

Unlimited Number of Sub-Album Levels

Also note that Gallery manages photo collections in a hierarchical view, a tree of albums (albums, sub-albums, sub-sub-albums, etc).
To get a relational view on your photo collection, you can use dynamic albums that are generated based on keywords / tags and other criteria like 'recently added items'.

Many specific features are available through official and 3rd-party modules. For more information, please see:

Evaluate

Gallery is free. See Evaluate Gallery for details on how best to evaluate Gallery.

License

Gallery is open source software licensed under the GPL. Gallery is free to download, use and to customize. There are no costs involved in acquiring the product and you are free to modify the source code to customize the application if you wish to do so. For details of the license please refer to the GPL.

Maintenance

Gallery maintains public trackers for bugs, feature requests and translations. Major releases of Gallery 2 not only come with many new and improved features and an easy upgrade wizward, but also with all the bugfixes since the last major release.

An upgrade path is always provided and compatibility between versions is usually maintained unless explicitly stated otherwise.

Reported security issues will always be addressed as fast as possible with security patch releases.

Future

Gallery is open source software maintained and developed by a community of users and developers. The development is a distributed effort, with collaboration from around the globe. The team is well organized, with weekly meetings, and constant communication.

We will always work towards:

Stability and Reliability

Data Integrity

Usability

Security

Performance

Seamless and Easy Integration

The Gallery community can vote what features it would like to see in an upcoming release and the Gallery team is happy to include patches and modules that the community provides.